The present disclosure generally relates to virtual and/or augmented reality systems and more specifically relates to an asymmetric structured light source to control structured light emission from a depth camera assembly.
Virtual reality (VR) systems or augmented reality (AR) systems can leverage the capture of the environment surrounding a user in three dimensions (3D). However, traditional depth camera imaging architectures are comparably large in size, heavy, and consume significant amounts of power. Example depth camera imaging architectures for obtaining 3D information of a scene include e.g., stereo vision, time-of-flight (ToF) and structured light (SL). Different depth camera imaging architectures provide different strengths and weaknesses, so certain depth camera imaging architectures may provide better performance than others in different operating conditions. For instance, stereo vision architectures operate well with high ambient illumination, while ToF architectures having an active illumination source may be impaired by limitations in signal-to-noise ratio from ambient illumination. However, because of the relatively large size of conventional depth camera imaging architectures, many systems including a depth camera typically use a single type of depth camera imaging architecture, in a static configuration and/or pattern configured for a particular use case. As VR and AR (generally under mixed-reality, both on-body and off-body) systems are increasingly used to perform a broader range of functions in varied operating conditions and environments, selecting a depth camera imaging architecture to obtain various depth information of a local area surrounding the system and the user may use more capability and flexibility. However, the design of such VR and AR systems are still imposed with the same volume and weight limitations.